Death on the Front Porch! Oh, For the "Good Old Days" in Rochester, NY!
When dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I was born in Rochester, New York's "Beer Belt." It is an older part of the city and not a toney one, inhabited by the working poor. In my day, most of the residents were either immigrants or refugees from Eastern Europe and English was a foreign language there. You needed to have a working knowledge of five different languages just to go shopping on Clifford, Clinton and Joseph Avenues. And the beat cops spoke them as well. Yes, we had beat cops back then, visible in the neighborhood, and a deterrent to crime and violence. Most residents there respected the authority of the police and wanted to have no trouble with them, since they or their parents came from countries with repressive regimes and feared to be sent back there for committing crimes her in the US. Most of the homes there were built before the turn of the twentieth century, so many did not have driveways for automobiles, since they didn't exist at that time. The stre...